Milos Adventure Engine Test

[Copes]

Hi guys, this is my first thread here. ive been reading the forum for quite awhile but ive never really been into forums, but i would like some opinions on a project me and a friend have been working on for some time now. the project was started to get out of doing a really cruddy sound breif for college.. lol but we decided to carry it on for more than the sound and were almost ready to start building the first installment of storyline. The engine does have some issues that i know of, but at the moment i cant seem to figure out why they happen. maybe someone could shead some light on it.

here is the url for the game in its current state:
http://rpg.copes-design.com (http://rpg.copes-design.com/)

im at work at the moment, but when i get home i will neaten up the current version because some things were added (the house and new screens) last night when i was very tired and needed my pillow.

Love to hear what you think, and any problems you find. i will list all of the current bugs i know of when i get home and find my arm length list :p

Copes.

[SeiferTim]

That is awesome! Did you create it all yourselves, or did you follow any tutorials? ;)

[Copes]

That is awesome! Did you create it all yourselves, or did you follow any tutorials? ;)
I guess you could say the initial ideas were from a tutorial i did for making a space shooter, showed me how to use key presses and hit boxes, aswell as how to add limiting factors into it all. Mainly tho there wasnt really a be all and end all RPG tutorial, that i could find atleast.

Most of it however was just kind of try, try and try again till something works. Now that the engine is 80% finished maybe for what i want to do for this installment of the game anyway, i cant help thinking of the different ways i would go about some of the coding. Guess that just comes with any large project you undertake. hehe maybe once this first hand in is out of the way (March 5th) then i will probably return and go through all of the code and neaten and change it, hehe im abit scared of editing large sections of working code at the moment tho. :!:

As i said earlier... the continuesly changing bus list:

* "sticking" issues with certain hitboxes, you can walk into it and back away from it fine, but if you want into the side of the house for example then try to walk up or down. it aint gonna happen, what is weird tho. if you go into the house, and back out it switches to another frame of the same content and the hitbox on that one is completely fine. nothing is different about the two. if anyone could maybe offer ideas that'd be great?

* "poison, fire, water and death" Every so often you can get yourself killed, but manage to regain health, while the death animation is playing. meaning the things that happen at the end of ur death, ie the respawn dont take place. and you just stay dead on the floor. obviously health potions can still be taken while your dead at the moment, thats a fix ill be adding later when i update the version. i imagine the same if statment could be used for the water aswell come to think of it. will let you know :)

* "areas" this isnt really abug, but simply me being lazy and not properly framing/keyframing the different frames or "areas" of teh world, so when you enter and exit the house all of the goodies are back on the floor for you to munch up.

Thats all i can really think of that people have found issues with. hopefully i will fix the 2nd and 3rd ones this afternoon and post the new version of the game over the weekend at some point.
* if anyone finds anything ofc post it and make my life harder :pleased:

hehe and if anyones interested i can paste the storyline of currently planned first installment of the game.

Copes

[Inferno]

Yea thats really good :)

But u should probly make so if u take all the items and coins and go into house and go out of the house, the items wont appear again.. :S

[Copes]

hehe yea thats the idea mate, got it all on my "todo" list :)

[JoMan]

Man, that is very impressive :). Did you customly make those sprites yourself?

peace

[Copes]

hehe yea, you wouldnt belive the list of things i have to make :x i think theres 143 seperate things between the two of us. within kinda a week? lol should be interesting :geek: ofcourse i volenteered myself for all the difficult ones. as you do.

Thanks for all of the nice comments about the game :) feel free to make suggestions too hehe, always good to get other peoples opinions and ideas. why im here really ;)

Copes

[eiefai]

i like it, very much, seems interesting

[Copes]

oh yes, there was something else i was pondering, were using 8-bit png files for all of the sprites in the game, but if you look at the rock you'll notice on some of them the side has 3 pixels of black on one side, and only one pixel on the other side. when the origonal png actually has a 2px border around the whole thing. i had this problem when aligning the house sections aswell. ive seen tile based worlds before and i assume there is a way, methology to get around this problem? all ears open :D

Copes

[SeiferTim]

oh yes, there was something else i was pondering, were using 8-bit png files for all of the sprites in the game, but if you look at the rock you'll notice on some of them the side has 3 pixels of black on one side, and only one pixel on the other side. when the origonal png actually has a 2px border around the whole thing. i had this problem when aligning the house sections aswell. ive seen tile based worlds before and i assume there is a way, methology to get around this problem? all ears open :D

Copes

Turn off "Smoothing". When you right-click on your graphic in the Library, you should see an option...

[Copes]

smoothings already off. might it have something to do with objects at co-ords like
240.6 / 120.3 ?

[JoMan]

smoothings already off. might it have something to do with objects at co-ords like
240.6 / 120.3 ?

Hmmmm, since this is a sprite game, do you have the quality automatically on "LOW"?

EDIT: n/m. By the way, how did you change the swapDepth properties for the hero when he goes behind a tree? Did you say:



if (hero._x >= tree._x) {
hero.swapDepths(1);
} else {
hero.swapDepths(10);
}

peace

[pizzaguy234]

hey, the problem you are experiencing with the pngs is an issue with flash. there was a site posted a while back, which explains the problem and the solutuion but i can't remember it.

Basically, u can solve the pixel shift problem by putting each sprite into a movie clip, with the registration point in the bottom right hand corner.

This means that all of the image, png or whatever, is in negative space.

for instance x=60 y=60 should be changed to x=-60 y=-60

well, hope that helps, try it out, i promise you it works. Also try an image in a MC with reg in the center. you can see the shift in some parts, but not in others

peace. andy.

[Lord Rahl]

Neat, the design and layout are uniqe. Keep it up.;)

[Inferno]

Uhm.. What program did u use when u made those graphics?

[Copes]

omg, is it just me or when you type a message and preview it, does this box occasionally grey out? and you lose all your message.. maybe its just me lol wouldnt suprise me.

to answer some questions...


Inferno, Uhm.. What program did u use when u made those graphics?

I use Adobe photoshop for my pixel graphics, using the pencil tool set to 2px. My co designer Alex uses Pixen. It seems a very good application, bitmap based, has layers, layer effects. seems very good for this kind of work. The only draw back however is... Its a mac only application. which i dont have :(


joMan, By the way, how did you change the swapDepth properties for the hero when he goes behind a tree?

Actually we dont use that method for making the 2D and a half view. We did consider doing it that way, but decided it would just be alot more code to manage. Instead i had ago at a more basic idea i had, basically using the layers like this:

Layer 1: http://rpg.copes-design.com/copes/halfrock.png
Layer 2:http://rpg.copes-design.com/copes/milo.png
Layer 3: http://rpg.copes-design.com/copes/fullrock.png
Layer 4: Hitbox

Basically its just a case of positioning the hit box layer so the character can move behind the half graphic, without sticking his feet out of the bottom of it. this makes it look as though the object is "3D" but ofc its not :)

Rather than using the bottom half of the graphic on layer 3, we decided to use the entire image, incase we needed to add a full object in unaccessible places and to stop possible gaps between the two graphics.

I hope that answers some questions :) and thank you pizzaguy234 i will try using registration points in the bottom right corner.

Is there a way of repositoning reg points on a mc after its been made? theres quite a few mc's i would have to remake :x dont really want to dismantle the whole game at this point. lol but i havent been able to figure out how you do it, if you can?

Im meeting up with alex on monday to add the finishing code thats missing for the "major" parts in this version, so hopefully ill have something new and exciting to post.. lol :D

Thanks guys, Copes

[Inferno]

whoa.. I think photoshop is hard so I use paint :D

[Copes]

hehe its not really that hard, make sure your using the "pencil" tool tho. you can get it by holding on the brush icon, and the pencil tool icon flips out. its alot easier when it comes to adding shade etc, because u can use the layer settings like multiply and screen. aswell as just having layers to seperate things out. and you can pattern fill to do big areas quickly :)

[Inferno]

Hey!

U inspired me with ur pixel graphics so I started to make a game and I use my own pixel graphics too!

I havent made much progress by my own but this is what I have made in one day:
(ok I didnt know how to make a tree so I stole yours, im going to change it after ive practiced a bit ;))
http://salsaish.tripod.com/talo.bmp

[Copes]

hehe its cute, i like the rose :)

[Inferno]

thanks, its tulip ;)

Oh yeah and thats a .gif so it doesnt have the real colors..

[Copes]

Hey guys.

Its been quite awhile since i posted anything here. hehe things got abit hectic finishing up college. infact i think thats not dramatic enough! lol

I thought you guys might be interested in seeing a larger version of the game which we handed in (not complete) unfortunitly. but ive picked up the project again and started working away. On my own at the moment. my co-partner seems to be very busy with work so ive just restarted the project on my own.

http://rpg.copes-design.com

The current version is 10.d

Theres a awful lot changed since i last posted a version here. so ill give you guys a quick run down off the top of my head about additions, bugs and still to do.

Additions




Multiple screens now
NPCs (grandma, Alchemist, Druid, Ghost)
Partly finished quest (starts with grandma)
Sword Slashing!
(in the first screen atleast. currently what im working on. the attack key is ctrl, hehe be patient its a start. and please let me know what you think on the sword play. its very important to me to get it spot on.)

Bugs



Cant go back up from grandma's house screen
Some of the boundaries on things are too tight and hard to navigate through.
Some of the boundaries arnt placed correctly resulting in getting stuck
Sword slashing upwards moves you forward 1px occasionally resulting in you becoming stuck inside boundaries
To do



Finish off the initial quest (ghost onwards)
Add damage to the attack
Add "life" to the enemies
Create more enemies
Create more unique graphics for unique areas.
you know i could go on forever with the todo list. lol my focus at the moment is getting attacking working correctly then ill go from there.

Please have a good go at it and let me know what you think / find :)

Thanks

[Copes]

Hello *echo's* so what did you guys think so far? :sc:

[optixburn]

this is pretty sweet. i didn't find any quest right off the bat. i just wondered around for a bit.

My first suggestion would be to make the character move a little faster ... seems to take forever to get across teh screen ... but this may only seem like it's long because there isn't much other than houses and trees ... and i did notice your things to do ... so this might not even be an issue after you get some of your other things done ...

when i have more time i'll actually test out all the bugs and see if i can give constructive feed back ...

pixel art is so cool

[Joppe]

You should have somewhere you can check the controls.
Also you should have faster speed on the character.
Other then that pretty neat job :thumb:

edit: btw, i didnt find the ship.. Is there even an ship?

[Copes]

You should have somewhere you can check the controls.
Also you should have faster speed on the character.
Other then that pretty neat job :thumb:

edit: btw, i didnt find the ship.. Is there even an ship?

hehe yea there is a ship, just keep heading down.
and yea the kinda splash, etc isnt done at all. thats just a quick temp thing wacked on there. pretty much on the bottom of the to do pile is the menu and tutorial bits :)

and in regards to the quest, i was thinkin of maybe having a note somewhere when you start.

also gonna add some kind of "map" thing aswell and add text to the sign posts so its alittle easier to find where your going. been working on the sword fighting today, made alittle progress, had to beef up my monsters tho so they have life, and death animations and stuff, not just tweened hit boxes hehe.

you know when your using hitTest is there a way to do:

if (this.hitTest(any hit box)) {
do stuff...
}

would be really handy rather than having to give items names.

Thanks.

[GPP]

I think I've seen these sprites in RPG Maker

Very nice game though

[Joppe]

What!.. Are you sure Crayon..?

[GPP]

Yep especially the bookcase! I know that bookcase I use it many times in rpg maker.. thats the first thing that caught my eye

[Copes]

Hmm, id be quite intersted to see what sprites are in rpg maker. Considering i specifically remember spending weeks making sprites. (still on going *sigh* lol) some probably do look similar to some gb games etc, but to be honest i have made them myself, but considering the amount of pixels were talkin about for somethings im sure theres no doubt something will look similar to other games. I would like to see the bookcase from rpg maker tho Crayon-Inc if you could post a screeny :)

On another topic, what did you guys think of the enemy's AI (its not brilliant i know) lol and there are a few bugs with it.. but its a work in progress :)

www.milosadventure.co.uk if you dont know it already from my bugging :P